The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (22 page)

So what did he mean?

In the days that followed, the days leading up to the time he would have his fortune deposited in the bank and all hell would break loose in his life, he kept checking his wallet.

He’d put two dollars and thirty-nine cents in there in the morning, but by four that afternoon it would have become four dollars and eleven cents, or once even fifteen dollars and forty-five cents.

The next day, Linde would be careful to put exactly two dollars and thirty-nine cents in there. But sure enough, by the end of the day it would always have grown or shrunk to something entirely different. Had this really been happening his whole life? Even when he was poor and thought he knew the face and value of every dollar he carried? Was it possible?

He bought books and magazines about finance and read them until his eyes felt as if they were melting in their sockets. He talked to money managers, bank officers, crooks. Everyone told him something different, something else. It was as if they were all speaking different languages, although they were supposed to be discussing money. Liquid assets, offshore funds, rollovers, precious metals, arbitrage, green mail.

To check out a growing theory, he asked a prominent adviser what were the chances of a rollover with precious metals if he took his IRA and straight line depreciation through his Dog Cusp flatwear singles into a Finky Linky fund?

The adviser said it was damned risky, but possible.

Linde returned to Venasque with a steely look in his eye and said, “It’s the money! It’s got its own language. You can say anything about it and people think they understand. But nobody really knows what they’re talking about.” He told Venasque about his meeting with the adviser. The magician smiled.

“Now you’re cooking! Did you figure out the thing about the money in your pocket?”

Linde nodded and told him about the enchanted two dollars and thirty-nine cents. Venasque was so excited he clapped his hands together like a child.

“Right!
And
?”

Linde looked him straight in the eye and said something nuts. “And I want to talk to money. I want you to make me into money so I can ask it questions in its own language.”

“Brilliant!” Venasque howled, and turned the new millionaire into a dollar bill.

You know the phrase, “Money talks”? It does. There are no accents, diphthongs, cedillas or umlauts used because its language is one continual flowing hum that never stops and is never misunderstood by itself.

Every coin, every bond, every green or blue or red piece of valued paper is talking and being understood at all times. Money doesn’t recognize borders or sea level, azimuth or longitude. It is utterly egotistical, knowing only its own value first and then that of its peers. Nothing else matters. Its peers being the hundreds of billions of pieces of tree or stone, shell or whatever that have been converted at one time or another into money.

So it
does
talk, but no one listens or understands.

As a dollar bill, Linde went from a rich man’s lizard wallet to a newspaper seller’s shabby pocket to a woman with long fingernails ... Until he realized he didn’t need people’s choice to come and go as he pleased. He was free to do what he wanted.

The dollar bill William Linde quickly learned the language of money, but it was some time before he learned its greatest secret. This came only after he was deposited in an ominously large account in the Grand Cayman Islands and was taught about “The Plan”.

Long before the philosophers thought about it, money (or barter, currency, tender ...) discovered free will. The only hitch was, without man, it had neither importance nor manufacturer. So it bided its time, talking it over amongst its vast and forever-increasing community. Finally it came up with The Plan.

Since both were helpless without each other, but there was so much more money than men, it decided to allow him to think he was in control. He could worship it or treat it like dirt, scorn or speculate until the end of his long day on earth. But, like the child who thinks it is telling its parents what to do, money would keep a fond eye on its maker and keep its mouth shut. Unless it thought mistakes were really being made. Then quietly, like the heads of Swiss banks, money would step in and make the necessary changes: cause a collapse, create a cartel, ruin a Democrat, give a person like William Linde more in his pocket than he thought.

Money was also playful and had a fine sense of humour. It played games with people, jumping out of their pockets or jumping in, but often so subtly no one noticed.

It was a quick-change artist with an extremely small, but appreciative audience. Once in a while there were even some people who understood or figured out what was going on, but they kept quiet because that was the only request money made of its acolytes: we know what we’re doing, so please keep quiet about this and we’ll take good care of you.

Linde
asked why some people were so rich and others so poor.

Because God left the handling of this branch of life up to money; it did the best it could, but no system is perfect. There were inequities.

God? Inequities? That made him angry! Did they know what it was like to just
want
everything? Not need,
want,
whether it was better paint on your house or tickets to the football game? You couldn’t afford either because you had to settle. Did they know that word, “settle”? They knew it. They laughed and told him to stop sounding so human.

He awoke on the couch in Vanesque’s living room. The old man was drinking iced tea.

Linde sat straight up and jabbed a finger out at the other as if it were all the magician’s fault. “Money has a mind of its own and does what it wants!”

“Right.” He sipped his tea.

“So it doesn’t even matter what I do with mine. I could spend it all on women, or give it to charity. Because it might go there and it might not. It
might
help but it might not. Maybe some
inequity
will screw everything up!”

“Right.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do then? How the hell am I ever going to be happy here?”

Venasque smiled. “You were happy when you studied up on what it was like being rich. Why don’t you do the same thing with money? Study up on how you can use it a good way, so if the moment ever comes you’ll recognize it and know what to do.”

Linde frowned. “But I was sure I’d be rich one day. I’m not in the least bit sure money will let me use it here or there.”

“Show it you know what you’re doing. Convince it you’re right.”

From then on, people spoke of William Linde as a madman. He talked to money. Had conversations with it! He spent his millions (for as long as he had them) in strange, indecipherable ways. When asked what he was up to, he would only shrug and say, “Don’t ask me, I only work here.”

W
HY DO HEARTS BEAT,
cigarettes burn, or some dogs smell good? There are answers. There are answers for everything if we look hard enough, but this time Louis Kent wasn’t given the opportunity to look. It just happened and then there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

He woke up to the sound of a bell. A piercing, vicious clanging that, even through the snow of sleep, he recognized.

“Christ!”

He turned in bed and saw a face he hadn’t thought much about, much less seen, for fifteen years: Deryl Sipp. Deryl Sipp groaned in his bed across the room and pulled the pillow over his face.

Deryl Sipp, eighteen years old and early acceptance at Tufts. Deryl Sipp, who kept six bottles of Italian cologne on his dresser. Deryl Sipp with a girlfriend in town and another in New York City.

“Isn’t it Saturday? Why the hell isn’t it Saturday yet?”

It had taken a long time, but at the age of thirty-two Louis Kent could finally call himself a happy man. He had an interesting job, a wife who thought he was sexy, a small child who wouldn’t go to sleep at night unless Daddy tucked her in.

Kent came into his own in college after a miserably unhappy period as a teenager at a snobby boy’s prep school in New Hampshire where teachers played favourites and it snowed twenty times a year.

Soon after he graduated from the school, however, he began having dreams about the place and the people there. They weren’t bad dreams, but he often woke from them wide-eyed and a bit short of breath. In these dreams, algebra tests, lacrosse practice, and the smell of dormitory food were as real as they’d once been years ago.

In these dreams he was sixteen or seventeen again, running to class and tying his tie at the same time, or else feeling his bowels melt as he entered history class on the day of a test.

But Kent wanted to put that time as far behind him as he could. His wife often remarked on the fact that he rarely spoke about his days as a teenager. He replied in his calm and kind way that it wasn’t much fun reminiscing about a time that hadn’t been much fun to live.

Things we’re sure we’ll forget in time aren’t as easy to jettison as we think. A face pained by something we’ve done, a love that came and went when we were fourteen ... We are intelligent and rational, but we aren’t in control. Kent dreamed of high school the way one touches the scar of an old, deep cut: tenderly, with remembered fear and possessiveness. Childhood memories are our scars, and we often protect and caress them as much as we hate them.

“Jesus, it’s after eight!” Sipp leapt out of bed in his white underpants and ran out of the room for the bathroom. Louis continued to look at the other’s empty bed. Outside he heard boys’ voices yelling, cursing, laughing. He looked groggily out of the window and saw a steel-grey sky. Over a gap of fifteen years, he still knew he had only seven minutes to get up and dress and be down in the cafeteria for check-in. Check-in! In fifteen years he’d graduated cum laude from college, served in Vietnam, and married a girl he once thought impossibly beautiful and impossible to get. Yes, he had accomplished all these things, but now, once again, he was afraid of breakfast check-in.

He sighed and slowly pushed the covers away. All right, he would play this dream’s game as he’d done all the other times before. He knew he was dreaming, and that was reassuring. He knew that, in the middle of the morning assembly or a candy bar between classes, he would suddenly be returned to a world years in the future where his skin was clear of acne, the foreign car in his garage was only a year and a half old, and Ronald Reagan was president.

The first of many shocks came when he walked to the mirror and saw his reflection. His face was clear! His hair had receded to its thirty-two-year-old horizon, and lines like his would have looked like progeria on a teenager. He had the face of the world’s oldest high school senior.

Always, always in his previous school dreams, he was a teenager again. This adult Louis Kent face was a frightening new development.

“Come on, Kent, get your ass in gear!” Sipp zoomed through the door of the room and went straight to his closet. “If the Man-eater’s on duty this morning, we are royally screwed!”

Louis stood there wearing the green flannel pyjamas he remembered throwing out during freshman year in college.

“Sipp, look at me!”

The other looked over his shoulder and rolled his eyes. “What are you, queer? You’re beautiful, man. But come on, we gotta get going. You want another detention?” He turned back to the closet and pulled a rumpled shirt off a hanger. “If I get another detention I ain’t getting out of here this weekend and that, my dear Louis, is a no-no.”

“Deryl, I’m thirty-two years old! Look at me!”

“Kent, you can be as old as you want. Right now I am in transit and cannot worry about your mental illness.”

Sipp was dressed a few moments later and, with a sad shake of his head at his doomed-to-be-late roommate, ran out.

Kent sat down on the side of his bed and put his head in his hands. “My daughter’s name is Lauren. I have twenty-four thousand dollars in the bank. My account number is 35203564. There are forty-one thousand miles on my car.”

Head in hands, he spent minutes reciting what he knew were the real facts of his life: clients’ names, expensive restaurants, the way his wife liked to kiss. While he went through this sacred litany, he heard bells ringing and he knew, again by memory, that breakfast was over and chapel was over and the first class of the day had begun.

Some time later (by then he had fallen back on the bed but kept his eyes closed), the housemaster came in and quietly spoke his name.

“Mr Kent? Are you all right, son?”

Louis looked at the man and smiled vaguely. “Mr Haller, I am thirty-two years old. I graduated in 1968!”

“Are you feeling all right, Kent? Would you like to go to the infirmary?”

“Haller, I’m Louis Kent. I give to the alumni fund. I’m older than you, for Christ’s sake!”

It was true. The younger teacher sat down on Deryl’s messy bed and put his hands around his tweedy knees.

“Louis, you know I’m one of your biggest supporters around here. You’ve got a brain in your head, when you feel like using it. But this, kiddo, this is not using your head. You’ve skipped chapel six times this quarter without an excuse and that is not playing it cool.”

“But Mr Haller, can’t you see? I’m a man! I’m thirty-two years old. I don’t have to go to chapel any more. I’m married! I’ve got a gold American Express card!”

The other sighed and stood up. “All right, Louis, we’ll play it your way. Just lie back and be the fool. I’ve got a class now. I’ve said all I had to say.”

Haller closed the door quietly behind him and Kent was left, alone and afraid.

Blasingame leaned over and sneaked a glance at Kent’s almost-empty test paper. Kent knew nothing. All he could remember was the Pythagorean Theorem, but this was Advanced Calculus. The other boy snorted in disgust and looked back at his own paper. “I thought I was stupid, Kent,” he whispered meanly.

All Louis could think to say in return was a weak, “But I’m thirty-two!”

The teacher whipped around from writing on the board and threw an eraser at him.

“Kent, you’re not intelligent enough to cheat. Please don’t embarrass us all by trying.”